How do you determine if an asset is too expensive? Does that come from somebody else? Is that something you have to determine?
TL;DRCost judgments come from many departments using loose base guidelines, sometimes just trying an asset and seeing, plus profiling tools that isolate draw calls, geometry and texture cost, with QA and engineering investigating.
Yeah, it comes from a lot of departments. For us, we have some base guidelines we try to stick around. CryEngine allows for some pretty wide ranges, so it's not super strict. In a lot of ways, if we put something in, we're like, ah, this might be a little too expensive or whatever. Sometimes we just put it in and we see what happens. But we do have profiling tools: okay, let's isolate this helmet. We can derive exactly how many draw calls, how expensive is geometry, how expensive are the texture maps. We can get all that information. The profiling tools, we've got QA, we've got multiple levels of... Engineering will get involved. Like, oh, we're releasing a new landing zone. Oh, the NPCs are really expensive. It's oftentimes in a situation where you're like, okay, but why here? Why these characters? And you start to investigate further.